It's not a nightmare, so long as he doesn't wake up. In the dream he's driving straight through the sound barrier, thunderclap arrowshot ripping through the wind. His face set, every hair on his head held in place through sheer will even as he faces the blast over the windscreen of his Lotus. The road is straight, no turning to either side. It goes just where he wants to go.

(It wasn't this clear when it happened, when he was awake. The real road had turns and switchbacks, moments of doubt before the clarity. But this memory would be less true if it insisted on slow traffic or the odd stoplight.)

He tears through the right-angles of London. The towers surrounding him must think they're dwarfing his car, leaving him an insect, but his sense of his size is unshakeable. Let them reach for the skies, he's striking at the foundations. He turns the wheel hard, heads down the garage ramp. The engine an endless roll of thunder, a crescendo, accelerating even harder as he charges the underground.

He sheds the car but it barely slows him, still a relentless straight line through the pedestrian tunnel. 'Way Out,' the doors assure him, but he knows they only lead in. His heels tick through the seconds in the hallway, counting down to the explosion. Finally he wrestles the office doors open and lets in the light.

His papers, thrown down like a gauntlet. Each accusation a stake through the bloodless motionless man on the other side of the desk. Every word a crack of thunder, his fist a lightning-bolt on the table.

He turns and the office is gone behind him. Out the in door, ascending from the belly of the beast, till he feels the sunlight smack his eyes as he reaches the street and knows that the cord has been cut, his words will never be undone. At this one moment he is free.

The hearse starts following him the moment he leaves the garage. It doesn't slow him. Deep in the catacombs the machines pick through his remains, filing the debris of his career. Killing off code names and false histories, laying lies to rest, striking through his identity and finally burying him in a drawer marked RESIGNED. Oh, they can't even get that right--he'd been resigned to it before, but it's the last word that can describe him now.

His momentum carries him straight back to Number One, the building on the corner he calls home. The hearse creeps up behind his car, but he lets it wait--if this is a final message, that his old masters will watch him until he's gone, then let them try to sail in his wake. Inside his study he ricochets from table to desk to sofa, packing his bag without pause or uncertainty. The brochures of the islands go on top. The photo on his desk stays behind.

There's an undertaker at the door. Suddenly his room smells of lilies and antiseptic. He tries to turn but can't, reaches for the energy which drove him but finds it shrinking away, flattened under a weight strong enough to turn irresistible force to immovable object. Through his window he can just see the cadaverous figure outside his hearse, marking time with the tap-tap-tap of a finger as the gas cylinder pumps gentle poison through his letterbox.

The towers outside his window are bending now, a city block of stone and glass tumbling on him from on high. He calls on every bit of his strength--righteous rage suddenly muffled in wool--but it won't be enough, they've robbed him of the response of his own body as he collapses onto the sofa.

But as he falls he feels the wind rushing against his face again, and he knows they cannot stop him as he drives, straight through the sound barrier, thunderclap arrowshot ripping through the wind.

Over and over, all night and every night. This isn't a man who dreams of escape; he dreams of being captured. Even asleep he can't avoid the truth of where his act of rebellion has brought him. But as long as he can hold onto every detail of that first fresh blast of wind and sunlight, he knows they cannot take from him the certainty of those few minutes when he knew he was a free man.

So it's not a nightmare, until the moment when he wakes up. And then he stares blearily out his study window, and instead of London's towers he sees the quaint and gentle green of the silent Village.